Bus conductors, who frequently got into fights with commuters over change, are flush with coins after BEST slashed fares last month

Regular BEST bus commuters have their favourite stories of the conductor-passenger argument over change money, but nobody had imagined that the reduction in fares would put an end to such fights. So much so, that bus conductors are now pleading with the commuters to not hand over coins and instead deal with currency notes. Please tender exact fare? Not anymore.

The BEST said that within a couple of weeks of the revised fares being implemented on July 9, the daily collection of around Rs 4 lakh in coins tripled to about Rs 12 lakh. Bus conductor Santosh Thakur, who has been employed with BEST for 10 years, told Mumbai Mirror that he now spends 30 minutes just counting the coins, compared to around 10 minutes before the fare slash.

Thakur’s colleague Raju Dinkar added that he got extra pockets stitched to his trousers as the sheer volume of coins – mostly in the denomination of Rs 5 – made holes in the pockets. “Now we happily hand back change in coins,” Thakur said, adding: “it becomes impossible to stuff hundreds of coins in shirt and trouser pockets.”

The BEST officials said that suddenly, they are forced to think of ways to dispose of the coins, and they have started off by paying a portion of salaries in coins. The BEST Committee chairman, Anil Patankar, said the undertaking was “handling the situation”. “Earlier, we would get around Rs 4 lakh in coins, but the amount has now jumped to around 12 lakh. We try to dispose of the coins by giving them to traders, banks, conductors to hand out change, and even as part of staff salaries,” he said. Commuters are not complaining, though. Goregaon resident Shivam Kamble said that a couple of days ago, he handed a Rs 100 note to the bus conductor and he returned the change in the form of Rs 5 and Rs 10 coins. “I couldn’t have imagined such a thing happening on a BEST bus till a few months ago,” he said.